CONVICTED murderer Brett Peter Cowan tried to rape a ­fellow church member before a social event in May 1998.

Melissa Bridges, 31, claims Cowan — who on Friday was jailed for murdering Queensland teenager Daniel Morcombe — grabbed her breasts and kissed her after he stepped from a shower covered only by a towel.

News_Rich_Media: The dark past of Daniel's killer

She said she was 15 at the time of the attack.

Mrs Bridges, who was unaware of Cowan’s evil past until his highly publicised ­arrest in 2011, said she met him in the mid-1990s when he moved to the Sunshine Coast after a four-year prison term in Darwin.

Cowan’s aunt and uncle had brought him into the church fold in the hope of aiding his rehabilitation.

Cowan, now 44, had arranged to pick up Mrs Bridges (then named Melissa Holman) on the way to a street-ministry soup kitchen and was to pick up another, older church member en route.

“But he turned up in a van, dressed in overalls and covered in paint, which I thought was a bit strange,” Mrs Bridges recalled.

News_Image_File: Murder victim Daniel Morcombe. Picture: Supplied

“He said he had to go home first and have a shower, so drove me straight to his place ... in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cane fields.”

Mrs Bridges said when Cowan came out of the shower dressed only in a towel and reeking of cologne he lunged at her, pushed her against a computer table, kissed her, grabbed her breasts and clawed at her clothes, according to Mrs Bridges.

The frightened teen managed to raise her knee high enough to push Cowan off and darted through a door.

She called a school friend to come and collect her, she said.

Cowan was separately accused of abusing a young girl for several years and raping a 14-year-old girl he knew.

Boys, girls, teenagers, men, women. Cowan was driven by urges that defied age or gender.

And despite being jailed twice for random, brutal sex attacks on young boys, he appears to have roamed free afterwards with the barest of supervision.

News_Image_File: When I fled an evil sex predator.

Cowan revelled in his perversion, adopting the online username akin to “sexual deviant”, in one of several profiles on dating and meet-up websites.

On gay dating website Gaydar, Cowan had three profiles, including one he was using from Perth just before his arrest.

The Sunday Mail discovered the profile, using a variation of his new name Shaddo N’unyah Hunter, remained open during his trial for the abduction and murder of Queensland teenager Daniel Morcombe 13-year-old Sunshine Coast schoolboy Daniel Morcombe in 2003.

Cowan sought out a long list of extreme sex acts and said he was open to meeting anyone up to the age of around mid-50s.

A former girlfriend told police she was once working on her computer and looked up to see Cowan having sex with a male friend he’d brought to their home.